Eighty Six Years
by RabbitRun
Summary: Natasha Romanoff was eighty-six years old. If you had seen her on the street, you probably wouldn't have thought she was a day over thirty-four. It's funny how unfunny immortality becomes once you start to make friends.


Hey! This is actually a re-post; a comment someone made kind of inspired me to write an extra passage. I'm not sure if they've used this storyline in the movie, but in the original comics the Soviets had done an experiment on Natasha that made her (practically) immortal. To be honest, the math in this is most likely incorrect, so if you find any discrepancies, I'm sorry! Thanks for reading!

Eighty-six years.

Eighty-six years of war, of battles, of violence. Eighty-six years of watching the world spiral down into a pit of poverty and hatred. Eighty-six years of death.

Eighty-six years of watching her friends die one by one.

Natasha Romanoff was eighty-six years old. If you had seen her on the street, you would probably think she wasn't a day over thirty-four.

She had been so young, so naive when she had agreed to their experiment. She had been so stupid. Deep down, she supposed it was not her fault; what child _wouldn't_ jump at the idea of being immortal—to never get old, to never have to become a part of the tides of death that wash over the earth and keep it in balance? She would never suffer the pain and humiliation of old age, never have to grapple with her own mortality. Because she was, in essence, immortal; at the age of thirteen, two hundred fifty years seemed like an eon.

At eighty-six, two hundred fifty years seemed like an eon.

It's funny how unfunny the idea of immortality gets once you make friends. During childhood, Natasha had made a vow to never let anyone in too close—her parents' deaths had taught her that. Attachment creates risk, risk creates failure, failure creates worthlessness. By growing to love someone, you only augment the risk of pain and heartbreak. Those are the facts of life; anyone who believes otherwise is nothing but a child.

But anyone who's lived for eighty-six years knows that that's impossible—without love, you'd go crazy before you reached your twentieth birthday.

Which she did. Almost. She probably—no, definitely—would have if it weren't for Clint. Nobody except Clint and later Bruce knew it—and she had sworn him to secrecy when he found out—but had Clint not acted when he did, Natasha Romanoff would be nothing more than a splotch on a set of train tracks in the middle of Siberia.

To this day, she still wasn't sure why he did what he did. He was just like her: alone, unattached, a ruthless assassin who could shoot a stranger in the back and follow it up with a cup of coffee and a movie. If she had seen her target about to fling himself into the path of an oncoming train, the only thing she would do is celebrate the fact that there would be fewer tracks for her to cover and watch to make sure the son of a bitch actually went through with it. At first, when she felt his muscular arms encircle her abdomen, she thought it was just so he could do the job himself; some assassins were a little more "hands-on" than others. But maybe it was because he was so alone that he saved her—he saw himself in Natasha, saw his future, and knew he'd need someone if he was going to get through life without losing his mind in the process. He had always been so much smarter than her about that kind of thing than she.

But that was why she had accepted the offer, wasn't it? Not in order to spare her life, but because he had made a genuine offer of partnership, of friendship. And on top of that, SHIELD provided an entire network of belonging; she had never belonged to anything before.

For those who thought that belonging to something wasn't important, they were wrong. They were wrong and naive. They couldn't possibly understand the feeling of destitution, of utter hopelessness that came with being so completely alone. Sure, they could try and pretend that they didn't need anyone—that they somehow stood apart from the throng of humanity—but they were only fooling themselves. Just like she had done. Human beings were social creatures; they craved companionship, and no matter how special you thought you were, it was impossible to escape the fact that you need at least one other soul to trudge through life with.

And then she had met the Avengers. Well, not met so much as was forced to coerce with. Natasha had never had a family before, but if she had to guess, the team was probably the closest thing to a family she could ever have. A dysfunctional family with enough issues to send a psychologist into early retirement, but a family nonetheless. And for a while, things were better—great, actually. She smiled more, talked more; her step had almost a bounce to it, and she laughed. And not just with sarcastic scoffs or half-hearted chuckles, but with actual laugher. From time to time, Natasha Romanoff could even be heard giggling. For the first time in twelve years, Natasha began to feel the warmth of emotion, of happiness—and it was all thanks to her strange little group of misfits.

But if there was one thing that Natasha had learned in her eighty-six years, it was that all good things must come to an end. Stark was the first to go. He survived longer than he should have, really; normal people would probably have crumbled under the pressures of Stark's lifestyle. (Then again, Stark didn't really fall into the category of "normal people.") His death wasn't really anything spectacular—it certainly wasn't an end you would expect the great Iron Man to meet. While walking home from a party one Friday evening, he accidentally stepped into the path of an oncoming car. That was it—no grand explosion, no malfunctioning machinery, no noble death in the heat of battle. He was killed on impact; he probably didn't even know what had hit him. The death nearly tore the team apart: not only had they lost one of their best friends, but they were reminded of the unsettling fact that they, like anyone else, were not invincible. No one expected Tony to be the first to go—no one really even expected him to ever die at all.

When all you are known for is your suit of armor, you tend to lose the mortal man underneath it.

Yet, they adapted. If there was one thing the Avengers were good at, it was adapting. They pulled together, reworked their strategies, leaned on one other to get by. It wasn't what it used to be, but it worked.

Then came Thor. Kind of. It was complicated. But, no, actually; it was simple. It was simple in the fact that it happened on a normal day, in the middle of a weekend breakfast—Bruce was cooking pancakes, Clint munched on scrambled eggs, and the demigod himself, of course, had his mouth full of frosted strawberry Poptarts. Then, it happened. It was so sudden: a bright light made Bruce miss the pancake he had just flipped, and an aging man in an impressive golden suit could be made out whispering into Thor's ear. Thor suddenly became serious. He stood up, took the elderly man's arm, and said, "Goodbye, friends."

That was the last anybody ever heard from him.

Later, Jane Foster told them that the figure was none other than Odin himself, informing his son that Loki had died suddenly in solitary confinement. No one knew how; no one knew why. Apparently, Thor had returned one last time to tell his lover goodbye, and that he would not be coming back.

After that, the Asgardian vanished from all of Earth's records, as did his brother.

How ironic, Natasha had thought, that the one who had brought them together in the first place was now starting to tear them apart.

Rogers' death came next, and although it was unexpected, Natasha could not have pictured a more befitting end for the world's first superhero. It was during a battle in Chicago, when a group of young neo-Nazis planted a bomb inside a building holding some of the world's most powerful leaders. They said it was too late—that making it out in time was impossible, and they should just get as far away from the blast site as they could.

They were right. But Captain didn't care.

That day, Captain Steve Rogers successfully evacuated 150 presidents, scientists, and ambassadors hailing from countries from Tanzania to China. He wasn't so lucky. Later the mayor declared it "Official Captain America Day;" they built a statue. They held parades. People cried.

Natasha was one of them.

She vowed to attend each one until the day she died.

After that, the three remaining Avengers disbanded; the Captain was the one who knit them together with his unbreakable moral fibers, and without them, the team simply unraveled. Clint and Natasha went back to their old way of life—they didn't know anything else, and truth be told, they didn't really care. They clung to each other as if they were their life lines. Banner adopted a tendency to fall off the map for long periods of time, but he would always show up eventually. The group would hug, exchange hellos, discuss current events or the latest SHIELD gossip. They never talked about the past. Bruce would leave as quickly as he had come, though they never inquired as to where. If he wanted to be found, he would have told them.

Then, without any explanation, Bruce's visits came to a halt. Later Fury told the pair that he was found dead in an apartment in Laos; after doing some research, SHIELD scientists came to the conclusion that somehow, the serum had wormed its way into his heart, killing him in a matter of hours. They weren't sure why it happened then—they weren't even sure if Bruce himself knew it was coming. One week later, a small funeral was held; Natasha and Clint got to choose where he was buried. Eventually, they decided on the spot directly to the right of Tony's grave. It seemed right to them—he was the closest Bruce had ever had to family.

Banner's death hit Natasha hard—harder than either of the team members before him. They shared an inexplicable bond, a connection, an almost surrogate father-daughter relationship. For two weeks afterwards, Natasha refused to leave her room; only Clint could coax her out to get her to eat a piece of bread or take a jog around the track. Sometimes she would simply lie in his arms while he stroked her hair, her tear-soaked face buried in his SHIELD-issued sweat jacket. They didn't talk – there was no need to. They each knew what the other felt.

Natasha visited her friend's grave at least once a week.

Clint went last. She liked to think that he did it for her—that had she not existed, he would have been killed in action long before his career ended. Most SHIELD agents didn't last five years in the business, let alone thirty-eight—the fact that the archer held out until a whopping seventy-three years of age was almost inconceivable. Of course, the work took its toll; the immeasurable bullet wounds, torn ligaments, and bodily stress took quite a chunk out of his lifespan. Yet, he was there, and together, they endured. They never got married; they felt it was unnecessary. They were best friends, partners, lovers—they shared a bond that made them closer than any married couple could ever be. Putting it on a slip of paper would only belittle it.

Natasha wasn't a religious person, but if she were, she would thank God that Clint remained relatively healthy during his final years. She didn't know what she would have done if he had been forced to suffer the humiliation that old age can bring. Until the very end, they remained as close as they had ever been; they lived an average lifestyle, neither extravagant nor impoverished, and it was exactly what they needed. She had to admit it was hard—watching his body age and wrinkle and fold while hers stayed the same—but they managed. The night of Clint's death was, for lack of a better word, completely and utterly normal. They ate dinner, watched a movie on the couch, shared a kiss, and went to bed.

Clint never opened his eyes again. The doctors said it was just old age.

At least he hadn't been in pain.

In all the stories she read about people who had died weak and diseased at a very old age, the narrators said that they always "remembered them in their prime," in their youth. She didn't know if she agreed with that. Sure, the part of the world that did remember Clint would probably remember him as Hawkeye—a spry, energetic, sarcastic, middle-aged man jumping from building to building with a laughable amount of ease. To her, though, when she closed her eyes and tried to pull up the marksman's face in her mental picture frame, there was no look that stuck out; to her, he was just "Clint," a spirit that had remained the same throughout their entire sixty-six years of partnership. It wouldn't have mattered if he had died at the age of thirty-nine or one hundred and nine; he would always be her Clint.

So now, here she sat, staring at words engraved in a simple slab of stone—words that could never possibly convey the beautiful, courageous man that had captured her heart and kept it going for so many years.

_Clinton Francis Barton_

_1977-2050_

That was it. No flowery descriptions, no epitaph, no ribbon-cutting ceremony revealing a shiny statue of a bronze archer with his arrow pointed at the sky.

_Clinton Francis Barton_

_1977-2050_

It was so cold, so impersonal. Looking at these words, no one would know that the assassin hated—absolutely _hated_—being called by his full name. No one would know that his favorite post-mission activity was watching _Caddyshack _in his own pair of Uggs slippers with a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. No one would know that he distrusted almost everyone on Earth, but on the rare chance that you did earn his loyalty, he would fight for you until the end. No one would know that when he held you, your body became butter and all of your troubles seemed to melt away with it. No one would know that, despite his stern appearance, he had the most beautiful laugh in the world. No one would know how much he could love.

Clinton Francis Barton. Another funeral, another grave, another set of tears. But this time, there was no one left.

She supposed she could see the world.

Then again, she supposed she could leave that to those who hadn't seen villages of Vietnamese children blown to kingdom come.

She supposed she could go back to SHIELD and do solo work.

Then again, she supposed Natasha without Clint was like a bullet without the barrel.

Or, she supposed she could sit here a few minutes longer and play her own little imagination game, think back to earlier days when life wasn't as complicated. It was something they did often; they were—

_-having a picnic. Tony had planned it. No, no, Bruce had planned it—Tony was the one who had brought it up. They were arguing over which sandwiches to get. Bruce wanted pastrami; Cap wanted liverwurst. Tony liked to tease him about his love of liverwurst. Natasha always defended him, but would silently agree with Stark; Clint knew what she was up to, but he never let on. _

She smiled. She could recite his favorite sandwich by memory—

"—_roast beef and pickles on pumpernickel, light on the mayo, heavy on the mustard. Add a little lettuce, but only if it's the leafy kind." _

_They recited it in unison. Natasha would grin; Clint would reach over and tug her hair. Tony made kissy faces at them, Clint tried to start some kind of banter, and eventually, he would lose. He always lost. Natasha and Bruce exchanged knowing glances and started to chat quietly. And Captain would make his way over and awkwardly say—_

"So, what are you two kids talking about?"

She was mumbling now. A woman to her left glanced over with suspicion and took her children's arms to lead them away from the crazy lady talking to herself. But that didn't matter because—

"—_SANDWICHES ARE HERE!" Everyone stopped talking; some pigeons burst from a tree. _

_Thor's voice was enough to make even Tony Stark pause his ramblings for a few minutes._

_Then they would eat. They would laugh. Sometimes they would play football. Hell, even Natasha had started joining in by the end. The only woman on the team to score four touchdowns in under fifteen minutes. The only woman on the team at all—_

Natasha Romanoff.

Born in 1964. Set to die in 2214.

Natasha stood and turned her back to the grave.

Eighty-six years down. One hundred sixty-four more to go.

Well, there you go! Thanks for reading—I really appreciate it. I'd love for you to tell me what you think! :)


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